Luise Guest

Luise Guest worked as an art educator in Sydney for many years prior to travelling to China on a NSW Premier’s Scholarship early in 2011 to further her researches into contemporary Chinese art and art education. Whilst in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong she interviewed more than twenty artists, curators, and artworld figures, ranging from eminent artists such as Wang Jianwei and Hu Jieming, through to emerging artists. Since that first trip she has been writing regularly about Chinese art, returning often to China. In 2013 she spent two months in Beijing on a Red Gate Gallery residency for a research project focused on women artists. As well as her own blog (www.anartteacherinchina.blogspot.com) she is a regular contributor to a range of online and print art journals including Randian, Creative Asia, The Art Life, Artist Profile, and The Culture Trip. Her book "Half the Sky: Conversations with Contemporary Women Artists in China" will be published in 2015 by Piper Press.

From this Author

Ninety-nine animals stand in a circle, heads bent, drinking from a clear pool of impossibly blue water. Predators and prey are lined up in peaceful harmony: lions and tigers together with giraffes, zebras, and antelope; a big black bear with small furry creatures. What utopian vision is this? In Cai Guo-Qiang′s allegorical installation for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, he has abandoned his usual[…..]

Mao Zedong once said that revolution is not a dinner party. Less famously, he said it is not embroidery, either. Interestingly, however, some female contemporary Chinese artists have chosen to work with thread and textiles—and embroidery—in experimental, maybe even revolutionary ways. From Lin Tianmiao’s overt exploration of sexuality, fecundity, and the aging and decay of the body, to Yin Xiuzhen’s use of the embodied memories[…..]

Depending on who you ask, anywhere between eight thousand and thirteen thousand people attended the vernissage of the world’s newest art fair, Sydney Contemporary. By the end of three and a half days, the fair had attracted almost twenty-nine thousand visitors eager to see the offerings from eighty-three Australian and international galleries, presenting the work of more than three hundred artists. The physical scale was[…..]

In 2007 young artist Zhang Rui, then newly graduated from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, was one of 1001 Chinese citizens selected by Ai Weiwei through his blog to participate in his project Fairytale for Documenta 12. The experience proved to be a transformative one. Her body of work One Year is showing at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Small works, painted with[…..]

Driving the bleak stretches of highway to south-western Sydney to see “Pigeon Auction” at the Casula Powerhouse, an arts centre housed in a post-industrial relic between a polluted river and a railway line, I had time to reflect on the curatorial premise for the show. An examination of ‘suburban subcultures’ is fertile ground for contemporary art. I was intrigued to see how a coherent narrative could[…..]

In early 2011, when I visited a number of young Hong Kong artists’ in their studios, they spoke of their frustration at the focus of curators on art from mainland China, and of their sense of being a ‘poor relation’. Add to that the tensions simmering just below the surface as cashed–up mainlanders poured into Hong Kong, and it seemed a recipe for resentment. In[…..]

Twenty years ago in the Asia Pacific Triennial’s first catalogue Caroline Turner wrote, “Euro-Americentric perspectives are no longer valid as a formula for evaluating the art of this region”. Today this seems obvious – but to a significant degree this is due to the previous 6 exhibitions which introduced audiences to the richness of contemporary art practices in the region. It was through the APT[…..]